Shitpost totalitarianism
This week: no, Britain never had a claim to Greenland; and an extremely irritating map. But first: why Donald Trump is like a global toothache.
There are two sorts of problems in life. There are the ones that are discrete and contained which, however annoying, one can put to one side, at least for a time. There are others that may, on the face of it, seem smaller, but which nonetheless dominate everything.
Thus it is that, while an agonising pain in your foot when you walk can be tackled through the simple expedient of walking less, the slightest twinge of tooth ache can be all consuming. In the same way, you can live with the knowledge that you’ll soon need to redo your bathroom for a four figure sum you can’t really afford – but the slightest hint of a leak beneath a floorboard will almost certainly ruin your week. It’s not just the scale of the problem: it’s the fact you can’t know.
Donald Trump, of course, is a problem of both magnitude and uncertainty. It’s not just that he is, unquestionably, bad, it’s that we can never be quite sure how bad. If he were simply going to impose swingeing tariffs and invade the occasional Latin American country then, well, that would be awful – but everyone else would have some sense of what that meant and be able to plan around it. Every day, though, Trump seems intent on doing yet another mad thing that seemed inconceivable back in those halcyon days of December 2025. How can anyone hope to plan when the final bill never comes due?
There’s another reason all this is so horrific: the way it never quite allows us to look away. Every day of late, we awake to news of the latest mad thing he said, did or invaded over night, and are forced to adjust our sense of the shape of reality yet again. There’s a psychic cost to all this – I sometimes wonder if dentists are seeing a surge of nocturnal bruxism – but short of ignoring both social media and all forms of news, there’s not a lot we can do.
Even doing that will not, I’m afraid, change the underlying reality. The end of the western alliance now seems inevitable, not just because the next presidential election is nearly three years away, but because even if the Dems won it would feel mad, now, for the rest of NATO to ever trust America again. That is surely going to have consequences for us all – in the alliances our governments make, the amount they spend on defence, the role of US-owned tech in all our lives. You may not think you are interested in the global situation, but the global situation is, I’m afraid, extremely interested in you.
Once upon a time, to dominate one single country, a totalitarian regime needed propaganda and secret police. Now, Donald Trump dominates our every waking hour using nothing but his phone, and has colonised our minds as surely as he hopes to colonise Greenland. It’s the totalitarianism of the shitposter.
One reason a toothache is so debilitating is that it’s right there inside our head, where it might presage something much worse. The same could be said of Donald J. Trump.
No, Britain has never had a claim to Greenland
I’m undermining myself from the start there you notice. The correct, journalism-in-the-age-of-the-internet thing to do would be te phrase the headline as “Was Greenland ever British?” because some people have been asking the question. And even – especially! – when the answer is no, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states that you phrase the headline as if to suggest it might not be.
But I’ve got in trouble this way before – it doesn’t matter how quickly you clarify that you do not, in fact, think the answer is yes; people will already be yelling. And this is not a moment, geopolitically speaking, to be leaving any wriggle room over such things. So, no: Greenland is not British, never has been British, and even if it had, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest compared to the fact its people do not want to be British. Greenland is Danish, and those of its people who wish it were otherwise wish it were instead independent. Everyone else can piss off.
Unlike most of the time when people on the internet are just asking questions, though, there is at least some basis for thinking that “Is Greenland secretly British?” is not an entirely stupid thing to ask. That’s because it comes from two quite important people – one living, one dead. The dead one is the renowned Elizabethan polymath Dr John Dee; we’ll be coming back to him.
The living one is... the last Danish minister for Greenland.
